Passionate Mothering Towards An Ethic of Appropriate Mother-Child Intimacy

Society of Christian Ethics
Passionate Mothering: Toward an Ethic of Appropriate Mother-Child Intimacy

Author(s): Cristina L. H. Traina
Source: The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics, Vol. 18 (1998), pp. 177-196
Published by: Society of Christian Ethics
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23561085
Accessed: 31-05-2016 16:44 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Georgetown University Press, Society of Christian Ethics are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics
This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Tue, 31 May 2016 16:44:03 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Passionate Mothering: Toward an Ethic of
Appropriate Mother-Child Intimacy1
Cristina L. H. Traína
Abstract
Women's informal accounts of their experience, news reports, and

psychological and endocrinological studies concur that maternal-infant relations
are inevitably erotic, if not explicitly sexually charged. In a culture that both
affirms pursuit of "natural" pleasure and condemns overt eroticism in any
relationship between unequals, maternal erotic experience is problematic. This
essay gathers insights from the literatures of psychoanalysis, naturalism, maternal
practice, and victim advocacy, as well as the Christian theological ethics of Lisa
Sowle Cahill, Christine E. Gudorf, and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, to construct a
tentative descriptive and prescriptive account of maternal eroticism.
Nothing, to be sure, had prepared me for the intensity of relationship

already existing between me and a creature I had carried in my body and
now held in my arms and fed from my breasts .... No one mentions the
strangeness of an attraction-which can be as single-minded and
overwhelming as the early days of a love affair—to a being so tiny, so
dependent, so folded-in to itself~who is, and yet is not, part of oneself.2
For Adrienne Rich the ardor of maternity is intensely physical: the "passion" of
the infant gaze, the "pleasure of having [her] full breast suckled."3 Noelle
Oxenhandler calls this "intense physicality" "the eros of parenthood: an upswelling
of tenderness, often with a tinge of amazement, that expresses itself primarily
through touch."4 How many of us have been bodily in love with our children, have
178 The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics
been gripped by this unexpected and mysterious longing for "direct sensuous
congress" with them?5
The explicit eroticism of maternity is not news. Medieval women's accounts of
mystical drinking from the side of the adult Christ or luxurious nursing of the
infant Jesus contain erotic language no less powerful than that of their descriptions
of mystical bridal union with Christ.6 Recent and contemporary authors—Sheila
Kitzinger, Helene Deutsch, Sara Ruddick, Ashley Montagu, Marie Langer, Alice
Rossi, and Toni Morrison, to name a few—also treat maternal eroticism frankly.
Yet in an age still overshadowed by Freud, talk of this experience is dangerous. For
although the medieval church does not appear to have reduced maternal eroticism
to adult genital pleasure, Freud makes it hard for us to read any instance of
eroticism in any but a sexual way. Thus women of northern cultures in this
generation-especially nursing mothers—at times experience their contact with
their children as sexually pleasurable. This is not merely a case of "seeing as."
Almost fifty years ago, Niles Newton provided biological evidence of such a link:
nursing releases into women's bodies the hormones of sexual arousal and orgasm.7
Hence the urgency of paying special attention to the nursing relationship. Although
not every woman experiences breastfeeding as an erotic exchange, if maternal
eroticism is destined to be interpreted as sexual pleasure, nursing will fall under
suspicion first.
We do not reflect ethically on this brand of eroticism. But we must think hard
about it, for in a culture fixated on adult sexual release even the term "maternal
eroticism" puts two moral dogmas on a collision course. One is the belief—now so
widely accepted that even conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants hold
it—that the pleasure of erotic touch is a good worth experiencing, or even worth
seeking, in the proper context. If for many women it is hard not to read nursing—a
practice that doctors and parenting literature enjoin—as sexually pleasurable, then
sexual enjoyment of nursing is good. The conflicting dogma is the moral
conviction that relationships between persons of unequal power—and who is more
vulnerable than an infant in the care of its mother?—must be free from even the
slightest taint of sexual eroticism. Hence the "strange unease" Oxenhandler feels
when she describes the physical rapture of parent-child love. How do we deal
ethically with the conflict between the apparent naturalness and goodness of
maternal erotic pleasure on the one hand, and the seemingly necessary proscription
of it on the other?
This is not a purely theoretical question. The confusion of perspectives is

already wrecking the lives of families and confounding the tasks of child welfare
workers. Oxenhandler tells
of a young mother outside Syracuse whose two-year-old daughter was

taken away from her after she naively confided to an uninformed
stranger that she had become aroused while breast-feeding. She had
called a community volunteer center to find out how to contact the local
Passionate Mothering 179
chapter of the La Leche League support group. Anyone at La Leche

could have assured her that such feelings were utterly normal. Instead,
the community volunteer center referred her to a rape crisis center, which
in turn reported her to a child abuse hotline. She was arrested and
subjected to a five-hour interrogation, and was separated from her
daughter for an entire year.8
In a less clear-cut case, child welfare workers began a sexual abuse investigation
when a six-year-old girl mentioned breastfeeding. On learning, among other
things, that the parents slept unclothed and that their daughter sometimes cuddled
in bed with them, a judge supported the welfare workers' removal of the girl from
her home.9 Social workers and family courts should not bear the blame in these
cases; their mandate is to protect children from likely abuse, and they must err on
the side of caution. Yet in order to minimize damage to the children they are to
protect they must distinguish more subtly between abnormal, incestuous behavior
and normal parental eroticism. And they can hardly be expected to apply a
distinction no one has articulated.
This essay is a first effort to disentangle these categories, and like most first
efforts it builds its tentative conclusions on an artificial but necessary
simplification of the issues. First, it asks an explicitly feminist question: "How
does serious reflection on women's experience unsettle traditional modes of moral
thought on sexuality?" There is not space to answer this query comprehensively,
let alone pose the other questions that deserve exploration. Second, therefore, the
"toward" in the title is meant seriously. The following review of cultural and
theological resources for such a distinction is not comprehensive-notably absent is
literature on pedophilia, for instance-and my conclusions are provisional.
Challenges, additions, and refinements are necessary and welcome. Third, I focus
on mothers nursing infants to whom they have given birth. I start here not because
other adult-child relations are derivative or unimportant but because, rightly or not,
we tend to consider experiences that have verifiable biological causes to be less
voluntary, more inexorable, more "natural." The breastfeeding relationship may
then be the safest place to begin working out the distinctions between healthy and
perverse maternal eroticism and, eventually, between appropriate and
condemnable eroticism between unequals in general. Finally, I take the experience
for granted and look for interpretive guidance from two sorts of literatures: secular
psychology and ethics, and theological ethics.
Secular Psychology and Ethics
Each of the schools of thought below contributes something essential to the

task of analyzing maternal eroticism, but each on its own is inadequate. I do not
address social constructionism and critical theory directly—not because they are
unimportant, but because their singularly helpful message is the indispensable
reminder to watch for ideological dragons, to avoid reducing women to mothers,

and to resist any assumptions that we have defined maternity or sexuality once for
all.
Freudianism
Freudian appreciation for the crucial and fragile process of psychological

development in infants and children is an element of all the other categories of
thought below, especially contemporary naturalism. Freud and his intellectual
descendants insist that we approach children with great thought, care, and respect,
that we understand the weight of even our earliest patterns of interaction with
them.10 In particular, infants are already sexual subjects, and failure to respond
appropriately to the needs posed by their sexual developmental stages can lead to
sexual, social, and psychological problems later." Thus, although Freud and those
who came after him may have erred by seeming to reduce everything to sex, they
at least integrated sex psychologically with other human emotions and desires and
so humanized and domesticated it.
Freud's pupils, Marie Langer and Helene Deutsch, went on to acknowledge the
sexual eroticism that breast-feeding arouses in mothers, gave it a place in the
psychological system, recognized the conflicts and ambivalences it posed, and put
limits on its appropriate fulfillment.12 In addition, 25 years before Kristeva, Langer
decried the western dissociation of maternity and sexuality in the asexual ideal of
the Virgin Mary, that "maximum symbol of motherhood for Western man."13
Langer at times listened so hard to women's maternal experiences that she turned
Freud's psychoanalytic focus upon "adjusting" women to their cultural
circumstances upside down: internal psychological tensions revealed points of
external cultural conflict, rather than the reverse.
Yet the Freudian revolutionary integration of sexuality with human emotional
and developmental life was achieved at a significant cost. In the end it resembles
Ptolemaic astronomy: it correlates observed events brilliantly, but the explanation
it gives—the unconscious—ends up obscuring rather than illuminating their true
connections. Mothers' anxiety over the conflict between maternity and outside
work evolves not just from unresolved tensions with their parents but also from
social and economic pressures. Similarly, not just remembered orality, but
hormones, make breast-feeding erotic. Nipple-biting may sometimes be an attack
on the mother,14 but teething pain is an important and usual cause. Although for a
psychologically conflicted mother cracked nipples may be a welcome excuse to
stop nursing, fissures themselves are not, as Langer suggested, the result of
unconscious emotional sabotage15 but a consequence of poor nursing technique. As
Eli Sagan concludes, Freud never could decide whether we should integrate the
mind and the body or leave the body as far as possible behind,16 and that
ambivalence—as far as it endures in western psychology—ensures ambivalence
toward the conscious eroticism of nursing.
Naturalism
One antidote to Freudian anxiety about the body is what might be called
bioevolutionary naturalism. It is fashionable to say that sexuality is a cultural
construct.17 But naturalism's first point is that sexuality is embodied and therefore,
to an important extent, given. For example, Alice Rossi argued recently that
sexuality is not simply a plastic idea but also an embodied experience
encompassing "physical and chemical processes" laid down in us over millennia,18
processes that resist "dramatic changes in social and economic circumstances" and
the new ideals and practices of sexuality these changes generate: 'The most ardent
feminist and the tenderest of men carry residues of the old traditional ways, and we
cannot yet know to what extent our cognitive reformulations can control and
redirect the quite different messages that stem from earlier emotional layers of our
personalities, resist the pressures imposed by external roles we need to fill in
society, or cope with opposing predispositions laid down in the biology we have
inherited."19 Rossi believes that we may be unable to wish away gender differences
in such things as mate selection criteria, verbal and spatial intelligence, levels of
comfort with casual sex, or styles of love. This does not mean that we must simply
resign ourselves to following our archaic tendencies,70 but it does dictate that if our
new, more egalitarian constructions of sexuality are not to be self-defeating, we
must compensate for the bodies and psyches that evolved in eras in which men's
and women's social roles differed radically.21
It is not necessary to accept Rossi's list of potential non-negotiables in order to
see what her thesis might yield for this discussion. Our task is to identify and learn
to live with the less malleable dimensions of our sexuality. Maternal eroticism may
be an evolutionary adaptation that motivates women to nurse their children and,
like sex,22 inspires caretaking behavior. Now that we have other perfectly good
feeding methods, not to mention religious and social inducements to care for our
children, this unavoidable eroticism is superfluous. The challenge is dealing justly
with it today. The answer, Rossi argued 25 years ago, lies in the context: twentieth
century western culture is marked by western male desire to control women's
sexuality and hence by the submergence of maternal eroticism. Here the
appropriately rebellious feminist response is to embrace maternal eroticism and
speak publicly about it.23
Rossi bases her argument on women's bodily experience and social standing.
Ashley Montagu, although cognizant of both the eroticism of nursing for women
and the physical benefits for both mother and baby of breastfeeding, points toward
a slightly different use of naturalism. He makes what amounts to a moral case for
meeting children's developmental social, emotional, and psychological needs for
touch, supporting his thesis with descriptive studies of touch-deprived primates
and hospitalized and orphaned children.34 Relaxed breastfeeding—the perfect

medium of nurturing touch—is also the infant's earliest and possibly most
influential sexual education.25 Love and caress, and the baby will grow up happy,
healthy, and capable of sexual affection; deny its need for touch, and it will grow
up stiff and rather uncomfortable with people.26 Muses Montagu, "Freud himself
was a bit of a cold fish, and one cannot avoid the suspicion that he was
insufficiently fondled when he was an infant."27 Yet Montagu's naturalism is not
rigid. As his primary concern is the baby's social, sexual, and psychological
welfare, the manner in which the baby is cuddled and talked to is much more
important than the mode of feeding; better a gentle, nurturing bottle-feeding than a
cold, impatient breast-feeding, he implies.28
Rossi and Montagu explore from the mother's and the child's perspectives,
respectively, the naturalist maxim that the body makes moral claims. Yet they and
other naturalists sometimes fail to consider the interpersonal and social dynamic of
touching. This problem—evident in both Montagu and Rossi—finds its way into
childbirth and baby care literature, much of which is breezily dismissive of—even
blind to—the genuine psychological conflict that may accompany the intense
tactile pleasures of mothering an infant. As Sheila Kitzinger at least points out,
some women experience considerable conflict, even revulsion, at experiences of
arousal during breast-feeding, or even at sharing their breasts—which had been for
them organs of sexual display or pleasure—with an infant.29
Yet Kitzinger, like most naturalists, naively fails to ruminate on the social,
experiential roots of these conflicts. For instance, Elaine Westerlund found that the
female victims of childhood incest whom she interviewed, if they nursed at all,
often felt betrayed by their own unsought erotic responses to their children and
said that the pleasure of nursing felt incestuous. That many victims of incest find it
difficult to associate love and sexual intimacy30 may further complicate the issue.
Conversely, Niles Newton found that women who are comfortable with their own
sexuality tend to succeed at breastfeeding;31 presumably they are also less anxious
about its erotic dimensions. How "natural" following "nature" is depends upon
whether our experience permits us to trust it.
Naturalism presents a number of other dangers against which it can be
protected only by an additional philosophical overlay. First, even when naturalism
exerts itself mightily against the tendency to equate description with prescription,
the lines it draws often seem arbitrary. One leaves Rossi, for instance, wondering
whether men's tendency to desire attractive mates is really ingrained. It may be
ubiquitous, but is it biological? Naturalism also easily casts women in the
"barefoot and pregnant" role. Second, Montagu and the childbirth and parenting
literature especially assume that although others may have a wounded or perverse
sense of the body, the reader will not go wrong if she simply attunes herself to her
own and others' "biopsychosocial" needs. An important warning against this
assumption is Edward Brongersma's two-volume work on man-boy love, which
draws upon primate studies, developmental arguments, and accounts of man-boy
relationships to argue that man-boy love is a natural and even superior way of
meeting boys' needs for affection.32 So although naturalism deals seriously with
the body and with developmental requirements, it is not a sufficient basis for an
ethic of intimacy.
Maternal practice
Brongersma's arguments could lead us—as he unabashedly admits—toward

full-fledged incest: mothers seeking out their infants explicitly for sexual
gratification. Brongersma sees no difficulty here, but we should, and that is where
the collection of authors we might call "maternal practice thinkers" can be
particularly helpful: in distinguishing, as he refuses to, between the eroticism (for
example) of nursing an infant and the eroticism of initiating a full-fledged sexual
affair with one's 15-year-old son.33 Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Noelle
Oxenhandler, and Julia Kristeva work not solely from psychological, sociological,
and evolutionary studies but also from their own experience of concrete, embodied
maternal practice.
Oxenhandler helps us begin to grasp the distinction between maternal and
romantic eroticism:
In its intense physicality, it partakes of the love that also exists between
grownup lovers—but it is different in some absolutely crucial ways. For
healthy parental love is a sheltering, protective love that respects the
radical inequality—in size, in power, in maturity—between parent and
child. Though it sometimes flares into wild playfulness, its predominant
rhythm is serene and relaxed, and it does not approach the driving,
climactic movement of adult sexuality.34
Parental eros, for Oxenhandler, motivates and rewards the "hard work, exhausting
and unceasing labor" of parenting and inspires an intense awareness of the infant's
needs for protective nurture.35
A second distinction, the distinction between erotic connection to one's own
infant and erotic relationship with another child, applies especially to biological
mothers and their babies. My infant—physically, at least—has been me. We have
already heard Rich marvel at "a being so tiny, so dependent, so folded-in to
itself—who is, and yet is not, part of oneself."36 Julia Kristeva adds, 'There is him,
however, his own flesh, which was mine yesterday."37 No wonder mothers treat
infants with passionate and meticulous interest! Yet, as Rich hints, this passion is
not self-perpetuating. It meets the developmental needs of both mother and child:
it lays the groundwork for and looks toward separation.38 Ruddick observes:
Regarded in the light of hope rather than suspicion, the entangling of self
and other in birth—physical union in metaphysical separateness—is a
crystallizing symbol not of self-loss but of a kind of self-restructuring.

The birthing woman is actively herself and her activity is a giving to, a
creating of another who could not live without her. Her creation fails
unless the infant takes up the singular life, breathing, crying, kicking,
sucking her or his own way into the world.39
Adult sexual union is the passionate catalytic reaction of two bodies that were
formerly not only distinct but unrelated. The ardor of maternity is the opposite: a
weakening of a formerly almost boundaryless connection, a stage in the long
process of separation of the infant from the mother: "a nursing infant and mother
hint at a union past."40
Finally, these authors are content to live with the ambiguity of an eroticism
that, impossibly, seems sexual but is not genital; they even insist that the truth of
parenting cannot be told without it. Oxenhandler ties parental eros to "exhausting
and unceasing labor"; Kristeva muses that "a mother is always branded by pain,"
and yet she returns us to a calm "that finally hovers over pain.'"" Rich finds it
impossible to remember the overwhelming wave of contentment that comes from
snuggling a new life against her breast without also recalling the equally
overwhelming emotional and practical strain of trying to meet the needs of several
children, spouse, and self.42 Ruddick reflects on the unique "conjunction of erotic
excitement, physical pain, and social promise" in birth, as well as the need to
combine a "welcoming maternal eros" with "sexual restraint."43 Oxenhandler
articulates the inadequacy of available modes of ethical analysis: "And there I feel
the gaze again—the gaze that cannot see that two things can share similarities
without being identical. For this mentality must have its boundaries in black-and
white; it cannot tolerate gradations or continuums. At the heart of it lies a sense of
great moral fragility. Precisely because the soul is so likely to plummet to the
abyss, it must be carefully protected by walls of prohibition."44
Maternal practice thinkers simply resist defining their experiences in the
singular categories with which ethicists are used to dealing. They can distinguish
but not divide pleasure from pain, sexuality from maternity, mental labor from
physical labor.45 Nor do subcategories created by adjectives convey the truth that
they are struggling to express. "Painful pleasure" and "pleasurable pain" sound
perverse or masochistic; "maternal eroticism" and "erotic maternity" make one
dimension of the experience ascendant over the other. What they are describing is
pleasure-pain or maternity-sexuality, genuinely multivalent experiences created by
the overlay of two or several simpler categories and radically different from any of
them.
What are the drawbacks of the maternal practice approach? First, we must
exercise caution. Used carelessly, it risks an epistemological matricentrism that
ultimately would disqualify all non-mothers from participating in discussions of
appropriate maternal touch. In addition, we must not ignore the care with which all
four authors examine the effects of social institutions and political ideologies on
the experience and moral practice of mothering. Failure to reincorporate these

would produce a naïve, culturally bound, and unself-critical vision of mothering.
But two more serious drawbacks also plague maternal practice ethics. To begin
with, it is not enough to acknowledge maternal eroticism and notice the necessity
of establishing a boundary between it and perversion; we must also explain
precisely where the boundary—or at least the danger zone—lies. Brongersma's
vision of man-boy love illuminates this need because it ostensibly fulfills all but
one of the marks of healthy maternal eroticism mentioned so far: the bodily,
biological connection between mother and infant. Plainly this criterion is no
protection against abuse. So while the poetic truths of these mothers' writings set
us on the path, we must hone our descriptions still further. We also tend to hide our
vices under the cloak of virtue. We may not be about to "plummet to the abyss,"
but we must balance a trust in our maternal wisdom with a healthy skepticism
about our intentions. We can misread, err, and ignore. Otherwise there would not
be child sexual abuse.46 Here advocacy literature steps in.
Advocacy
Among the most powerful writings condemning sexual abuse is the work of
Marie Fortune. Fortune demonstrates that our visions of ideal social relations,
however vital to our moral and spiritual lives, do not protect the vulnerable from
individuals and systems that now fall short of these ideals. We must be able to set
boundaries and identify violations. In professional relationships, which are the
focus of most of her writing,47
The purpose of clear boundaries is not to preserve some cache of

patriarchal power on the part of the professional. Boundaries used
appropriately create a safe place where an individual can reflect on her
own experiences and learn from them without having to deal with the
personal needs of the professional. In any relationship, boundaries
provide the structure within which a relationship can grow and mature.
Boundaries, like lane markers or guardrails at the edge of the road, give
guidance and direction and recommend necessary caution. Living
without relational boundaries is like driving on the freeway in a
snowstorm: very dangerous to all concerned.48
These limits are indispensable in a culture in which gross imbalance—for instance,

"the absolute powerlessness and vulnerability of a child"—is a sexual turn-on, a
culture that has not yet learned that "equality can be very erotic.'""
Two premises lie behind Fortune's convictions: all sexual activity must be
governed by the principle "do no harm," and a relationship may become explicitly
sexual only by mutual, genuine consent. The latter criterion has to do with power
relationships between partners: the choice of a peer as sexual partner, and authentic
and informed consent. Fortune elaborates it:
1. Is my choice of intimate partner a peer, that is, someone whose power

is relatively equal to mine? We must limit our sexual interaction to our
peers and recognize that those who are vulnerable to us, that is, who have
less power than we do, are off limits for our sexual interests.
2. Are both my partner and I authentically consenting to our sexual
interaction? Both of us must have information, awareness, equal power,
and the option to say "no" without being punished as well as the option
to say "yes."50
Student-teacher, congregant-minister, client-therapist, and employee-employer

relationships are all fundamentally unequal and so preclude genuinely free
consent." The parent-child relationship is analogous: a bond between unequals in
which the parent, possessing nearly absolute authority and social power, is
entrusted with benevolent care for the vulnerable child. For the parent to admit
sexual activity into the relationship—even if it is the child who "sexualizes" the
bond initially—is wrong.52
The usefulness of Fortune's criteria forjudging maternal eroticism depends on
the completeness of this analogy. Although the similarities are real and compelling,
two subtle refinements must be made. First, Fortune seems to assume that there is
no middle ground between suppressing eroticism on one hand and acknowledging
and acting on it in full-blown, adult genitality on the other. But this either/or, on/off
dictum does not quite reflect the experience of erotic interaction, either maternal or
adult. Ruddick, for example, combines acknowledgment and enjoyment of
maternal eros with disciplined, protective restraint—an eros of a different quality
than Fortune's, somewhere on or above a continuum between suppression and
abandon. Even relationships between adults admit degrees of eroticism. How
many of us can honestly say that we never engage in not-quite-subconscious
flirtations with others—perhaps subordinates or superiors—with whom we would
never dream of having an affair? So while Fortune's proscription of full-blown
adult genitality in parent-child relations may hold, it is not clear that she has the
language to deal with maternal eroticism as I have described it.
Second, for Fortune the inegalitarianism of parental and professional
relationships, and the prohibition of eroticism within them, seems to be
fundamental and therefore constant. Carter Heyward objects that all relationships
are dynamic and should move self-consciously toward egalitarian mutuality, with
its potential for erotic intimacy.53 Their disagreement is rooted partly in a
philosophical difference: Fortune holds that status differences are benign if the
powerful either voluntarily abdicate their power or use it to create justice;
Heyward sees status differences as inherently oppressive.54 But relationships
between unequals—therapy, teaching, parenting-are more subtle and complex
than either author admits. For instance, the mother-child bond is dynamic but may
be permanently unequal without being dysfunctional.55 Eventual, full parent-child
mutuality is a fine hope but a rare accomplishment and a presumptuous and unfair
expectation. In this dynamic but unequal relationship, my overriding maternal task
is developmental: to nurture my children in such a way that they learn to create
mutual relationships with others.56 I cannot complete this charge without a
frightening degree of intimacy, tenderness, and its accompanying eroticism. In
short, eroticism cannot simply be excised from this unequal relation. A glimmer of
an acknowledgment arises in Fortune as a negative criterion for the adult-child
connection: "children and adults do . . . have intimate or deeply meaningful
relationships. But adults should not be asking children to meet their emotional and
sexual needs in the same way that they ask their adult partners to do so."57 Still
lacking is a more explicit description of adult-child relationships and the likewise
unique place of a healthy eroticism in them.
What materials for an ethic of maternal eroticism have we gleaned so far?
None of the approaches examined so far is adequate, but cumulatively their
wisdom is impressive.
1. Maternal eroticism is widely acknowledged, as are its connections to
evolutionary biological factors. The capacity for maternal eroticism is universal,
not merely in the human mind, but also in the physical and emotional "wiring" of
the evolved female body. It is both "natural" and commonplace, although social
constructions have a say in its articulation; so although not all contemporary
mothers experience it as sexual, a large proportion of them inevitably do.
2. Although attentive affection, including loving touch, is a universal condition
of thriving, it is a prerequisite especially for children's normal emotional, physical,
and social development. The eroticism of maternal touch, especially breast
feeding, tends to make this task an attractive one. Yet its developmental character
also seems to dictate a gradual tempering of intense physical contact in response to
the child's changing needs-for instance, as a child begins to wean. This separation
meets maternal needs as well.
3. Mothers tend to describe mothering experiences multivalently rather than
reducing them to singular categories. Thus even when maternal eroticism is
experienced as sexual, it is not typically experienced as identical to full-blown
adult sexual passion. Similarly, adult-child relationships can be intense, even to a
degree mutual, but unlike adult friendships. "Overlay" or "multivalence" may help
us to articulate the ethical import of these similarities and differences.
4. Gauged by the apparent holistic benefits of early, intensely physical
mothering for mother, child, and their relationship, maternal eroticism seems at
least morally acceptable, and possibly morally good, as long as it is alert to and
remains within the bounds of the child's developmental needs.
Theology
To this point we have explored a phenomenon and have begun to articulate

some guidelines for interpreting and evaluating it. The figures discussed even
anticipate many theological insights into parental experience. But a Christian
religious ethic must still provide an explicitly theological frame for maternal
eroticism, and here the insights of Lisa Sowle Cahill, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore,
and Christine E. Gudorf are instructive. What follows should be taken as
groundwork only, for probing their theologies deeply enough to enumerate all their
contributions, or to resolve the tensions among them, is not possible in a small
space. I limit myself to one dimension of each writer's work and caution that each
point can in fact be found in two—or in some cases all—of the authors.
Lisa Sowle Cahill and Natural Law
The feminist dilemma is that, while to ignore women's particular embodiment

has been to accept an unattractively sterile rationalism (or a social constructionism
equally ungrounded in physical reality), to embrace embodiment—especially the
maternal body—has been to risk an equally unpalatable reductionism. In the first
case bodies do not matter, so women are not-mothers and perhaps not-women; in
the second, all the elements of their character and experience are determined by
their potential maternity.
Lisa Sowle Cahill is notable for walking a path between these extremes. In an
era given to assuming that society constructs bodies, Cahill contends that bodies
ground society. Sexed bodies, she insists, are "relatively invariant over space and
time."5" Women and men do differ fundamentally and universally, and these
differences ground sexual reproduction and whole systems of social-biological
kinship, none of which Cahill thinks we should dismiss lightly.59 Yet these
differences are not absolute. Not only are women and men also united by their
even more fundamental common humanity, but also their sexed bodies
underdetermine moral norms, setting boundaries and conditioning possibilities
rather than dictating hard-and-fast roles: "Biological sex differences and male and
female parenthood... are more opportunity than limit."60
So like Rossi and Montagu, Cahill takes embodiment seriously and yet refuses
to map instinct directly onto moral norms: "It is neither true that what biological
drives suggest, moral expectations must accept; nor that every bodily tendency
which must be rearranged, sublimated, or even curtailed to accomplish moral
excellence is an outlaw to humanity's true nature."61 But as we have seen, this
affirmation alone can lead to arbitrary and opportunistic reasoning. If one
inclination is as obsolete as an appendix, and the next is a signpost to be followed,
what criterion supports this judgment?
Although, as I will show, Cahill's conclusions on adult sexuality provide an

analogue for a credible ethic of maternal eroticism, what is invaluable is her
method of making ethical use of physical givens: systematic criteria and
theological backing for a consistent method of identifying the type, scope, and
specificity of the body's authority in moral reflection. Cahill fills the gap between
bodily description and moral prescription with a version of natural law. She begins
with Thomas Aquinas, "for whom the natural law [is] the inclination of every
creature to the proper ends and actions intended for it by God; in human beings
this inclination is not just physical or instinctual, but also intellectual and
rational."62 Moral knowledge—as it has to do with interdependent, integral human
flourishing—is empirical and social.63 Experience sets bodily drives and gender
differences within a substrate of profound similarities in human social and physical
functioning, as well as principles of justice and right, and virtues of prudential
reasoning, without which neither societies nor individuals function smoothly.64
Bodies and embodied experience have voices, but they do not have absolute
power, for they are subordinate to the integral (physical, intellectual, and spiritual)
human telos.65 Therefore we must begin our reflection with this integral end.
Cahill's concrete conclusions are instructive in a different way. When she
reflects on adult genital intimacy in light of this integral end, a marital ideal
emerges: a God-given, interpersonal pleasure within an equally God-given,
inherently parental-reproductive context. An alternative vision of the human end
would produce a different ideal. Yet it is essential to notice that even this highly
traditional norm, when rooted in Cahill's vision of the body as the ground of
possibility of sexuality, suggests maternal eroticism as an analogue to the gift of
marital sexuality, for in a parental-reproductive context both could be seen as ontic
goods. Like all other goods, maternal eroticism would have to be probed for
trustworthiness, tested for empirical success, and related prudently to all the other
goods and ends before us.66 We need not apologize for its inherent 'Temininity"—
its potential distinction from male parental experience—but neither must we
accept it as evidence of a divine sanction for reduction of women to their potential
maternal function.67
Christine E. Gudorfand Self-interested Love
Christine Gudorf's powerful writing on sexuality and parenting develops most

of the themes discussed under naturalism and maternal practice. Gudorf sees
bodily pleasure as an experience to be trusted and a good to be pursued, as well as
the primary criterion and indicator of morally good sex.68 Like Cahill, she holds
that a critically reconceived natural law is the most promising foundation for an
ethic of sexuality that takes embodied pleasure seriously.69 But among her
indispensable theological contributions is an experientially inspired, critical
reconsideration of parental love. As Gudorf points out, western Christianity ratifies
an agapic model of parental love. Parent is to child as God is to parent: a font of
limitless, disinterested, selfless energy and affection poured out ceaselessly, her
children's welfare her only thought,70 her only morally approved gratification a
distant and intellectual satisfaction in a job well done. A feminist ethic of adult
mutuality does not necessarily disrupt this model of parenting.
Yet Gudorf does overturn it. Not only is genuine parental love thoroughly
partial and passionate, but also its task is to push parental relationships with
children toward greater mutuality and interdependence.7' The further, essential
characteristic of Gudorf's parenthood is her unabashed self-interest. Except in
cases of children with severe mental disabilities, we give one-sidedly to children in
anticipation of later reciprocity. Even shorter-term self-interest is common.72 Few
of us can honestly say, when we plead with an eight-year-old for the hundredth
time to close her mouth when she chews, that our immediate concern is that she
make a good impression in future job interviews; we are also hoping for a more
pleasant dinner hour. The same is true for toilet training, or finally getting an infant
to sleep through a night of reasonable adult length without nursing.
Gudorf develops two important consequences. First, in the family, as in society
at large, Christian love is a love that at least considers mutual self-interest, even
when it admits that win-win solutions are not always possible.73 This vision echoes
the natural law vision of the common good, in which the genuine good of the
whole generally benefits the individual, and conversely. Second, until we can face
honestly our tendencies to describe our love as agape while actually functioning
out of self-interest, we not only will be liars but also will often fail to meet both our
children's needs and our own.
When we assume that to do the hard, self-sacrificing thing is to do the

loving thing, we have, in fact, defined the interest of the other in terms of
ourselves, and not in terms of the person and conditions of the other.
When we overemphasize the Gift-love in our loving and deemphasize

the Need-love, we end up disguising our needs by calling them gifts for
others. This can seriously damage the other, distorting his/her real needs
and desires.74
Gudorf's rejection of agape yields us a God who loves us in the particular, who
delights in us, who has more than our own flourishing in mind when she sets the
goal and means of moral virtue before us, who in moments of genuine self
sacrifice anticipates our eventual loving response.75 We are to imitate God in
acknowledging and admitting to the pleasures we receive, not just from meeting
the needs of others, but in meeting them.76
What does this yield for maternal eroticism? Gudorf does not deal with
maternal erotic experience, or even generally distinguish maternal from parental
experience. But when we combine her writings on sexual pleasure, sexual
victimization, and parenting, it seems to me that they point in the following
direction: It would be an unnatural and deluded mother who never admitted to

seeking her own pleasure in her relationship with her children. The physical
pleasures of maternity are worth desiring, and on reflection may also be worth
pursuing, alongside and in balance with our other parental ends." If we obscure
these pleasures with claims like "I've continued to nurse only for the baby's sake,"
we hypocritically misplace our motives and so end up pursuing a self-sacrificial
ideal we know we cannot fulfill. At the same time, Gudorf cautions us that our
needs do not always coincide with others'; specifically, we must scrupulously
respect children's bodyright.78
Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and Demonic Distortion
The central claims of Bonnie Miller-McLemore's writing on maternity

corroborate Gudorf's and Cahill's. Her "mother as speaking subject" is
theologically subversive in the same way as Gudorf's parental self-interest; she
likewise concurs with Cahill's different-and-good-but-equal-and-not-determinative
evaluation of sexual biology.79 Her unique theological contribution is her sense of
the profound ambiguity and fragility of human practices. As we have seen, Gudorf
transforms the vice of self-love into a virtue, diagnosing one root of maternal
sinfulness along the way: the desire to disguise fulfillment of one's own needs as
sacrifice for another. In the midst of her celebration of the richness and
trustworthiness of maternal experience, Miller-McLemore too reminds us that
without serious attention to sin our paeans to maternal moral intelligence risk
baroque excess or demonic distortion.
Miller-McLemore alludes to two kids of maternal sin. The first arises out of the
practice of lactation and what she calls "fleshly" knowing: "circular bodily
reasoning, interweaving physical sensation, momentary cognition, behavioral
reaction, and a physical sensing and intellectual reading of the results—a trial and
error, hit-and-miss strategy." When this cycle fails (as it tends to do, late on the
umpteenth or even the first night of failing to comfort a wailing newborn) we
"must master a physical desire to retaliate in stormy, mindless abuse"; hence the
"immense power for misuse" of maternal knowing.80 This observation invites us to
add a second caution: if we trace a circle of bodily reasoning that is misshapen or
off-center, we and the child will wear a path the perversity of which familiarity
may make it easier for both of us to deny. Again, it is easy to think of both trivial
and grave examples. Then we have not only temptations to abuse but—worse—a
habit of it.
Second, Miller-McLemore is not romantic when it comes to desire: "In the
goodness of the human capacity 'to desire' lies the penchant not just to desire, but
to doubt, worry, covet, crave, envy, and forever increase what is desired. Desire for
the rich goodness of created life gives way to a disregard for divinely ordered
limits on creation and a drive for invincibility."81 The problem is not desire per se
but the human tendency to ignore human limitations. When we reach for too
much, we turn "being into having, sharing into owning, growing into getting,"82
eclipsing and forgetting our community in God, the ultimate source of good and
love. Miller-McLemore has in mind the excessive self-extension of American
professional women, a frantic fragmentation (made nearly inevitable by inequities
in the gendered division of labor) that turns some desires into obsessions and
completely thwarts others.83 But her point is more widely applicable. Any
attentive, delighted participation in a created good can become an insatiable desire
to possess and control it. On the wrong side of this line maternal erotic enjoyment
is quite clearly sinful.
Concluding Remarks
The strategy of this essay has simply been to assemble a collage of

descriptions, prescriptions, and theological ruminations with an eye to formulating
a coherent ethical response to the oddly hidden experience of maternal eroticism. I
have suggested 1) that maternal eroticism is a normal, predictable experience that,
while different from full-blown genital sexuality, has pleasures that are at face
value no more or less laudable than adult sexual pleasures; 2) that children require
the sort of attentive, affectionate, intimate touch that a restrained eroticism inspires;
3) that this mode of relating is appropriate to a relationship of progressive
maturation and separation, not ever more intense physical involvement; and 4) that
the experience can be truthfully described only multivalently ("really sexual" or
"primarily maternal" is inadequate, just as green is not "really yellow" or "truly
blue"). Maternal eroticism also requires a theology in which the body and its
goods and pleasures are dimensions of an integral human good, in which
relationships between unequals can appropriately incorporate self-love, and in
which we are made profoundly aware of our own capacities to misread and abuse
these goods and loves. Finally, as this essay has assumed but not argued, "what is
learned from biological motherhood has parallels in other persons":84 maternal
eroticism has analogues outside the bounds of mother-infant relations, in other
relationships of unequal power, and a careful analysis of it can both illumine and
be illumined by them.
These suggestions cumulatively confirm that the solution to the problem posed
at the beginning—how to negotiate between the affirmation of the goodness and
appropriateness of the erotic pleasures that arise in maternity and the imperative to
protect our children from abuse—must be not only methodological or practical but
theological. For underlying this problem there is a conflict between two visions: an
optimistic picture of the human inclination to know the good and do it, and soberly
recounted statistics revealing endlessly rationalized, unrepented sexual
exploitation. In the first case we have a profound confidence (reminiscent of
natural law) in the goodness of the female body and the appropriateness of its
desires to immediate and ultimate human ends; and in the second we have a
pessimistic account of a depravity—also frequently connected with the body—that
destroys knowledge, reason, and will. The constellation of insights that

accommodates the colliding trends of contemporary sexual ethics seems
theologically inconsistent.
Yet an honest assessment of the evidence suggests that the theological truth lies
precisely in the tension between the two claims: our capacities for moral virtue and
perversity are equally real. The key to resolving the tension may lie in an
ecclesiology and epistemology of communal grace. In her discussion of sin,
Miller-McLemore points out that failed generative knowing results in the
temptation to abuse only when no one else relieves the burden, helps her rethink,
or distracts her temporarily.85 Isolated reflection on isolated maternity quickly loses
perspective and grows demonic. When other people share the task of caring,
thinking, or even laughing, equilibrium is restored. The lesson is that the power to
discern and negotiate among goods is a communal power. If moral reflection is
truly inclusive and comprehensive, the community becomes a channel of a grace
that empowers us collectively to develop criteria for distinguishing between the
perverse and the good.
What are the implications for maternal eroticism? First, we can trust, value,
and even pursue maternal erotic pleasure within or alongside motherly caretaking.
At the same time, we must confess to our capacity to deceive ourselves; I cannot
trust myself absolutely to know when I have crossed the line into obsession or
abuse. The Syracuse mother's questions—is this normal? should I worry about
it?—reflect an appropriate caution. But not until parental experience and reasoning
become topics of wide public moral reflection will descriptions of appropriate
maternal eroticism acquire the richness and ethical nuance that will allay fears of
abuse by aiding us to articulate the boundaries between love and mistreatment.
Such a communal debate—challenging and endless—is the only way to
authenticate isolated moral experience.
Notes
'i thank the reviewers at the SCE Annual, as well as all present at the lecture, for their
helpful comments on this essay. Remaining errors are mine.
2Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, tenth
anniversary edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 35-36.
3lbid., 31.
4Noelle Oxenhandler, "The Eros of Parenthood," The New Yorker (19 February 1996): 47.
5Sara Ruddick quotes Walker's unpublished paper. See Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking:
Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 212.
'Cristina L.H. Traina, "Set Afire: Images of Maternity in Medieval 'Theoeroticism,'"
American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, November 23, 1997.
7Niles Newton, Maternal Emotions (New York: Hoeber, 1955); idem., "Psychologic
Differences between Breast and Bottle Feeding," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 24
(1971):993-1004; for a summary of many of her findings, see Niles Newton, "Interrelationships
between Sexual Responsiveness, Birth, and Breast Feeding," in Contemporary Sexual Behavior:
Critical Issues in the 1970s, ed. Joseph Zubin and John Money (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1973), 77-98.
8Oxenhandler, "The Eros of Parenthood," 48. See also Peggy O'Mara, "Breastfeeding and
Arousal," Natural Health (September/October 1992): 102, 106.
'Observation by the author.
10Here my estimate of the literature follows Sidney Callahan, "The Psychology of Family
Relationships," in Lisa Sowle Cahill and Dietmar Mieth, eds., The Family, Concilium 1995/4,
26-36 (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995), 29-30.
"D.W. Winnicott, The Child and the Outside World: Studies in Developing Relationships,
ed. Janet Hardenberg (London: Tavistock, 1957), 157.
12See Helene Deutsch, Psychoanalysis of the Sexual Functions of Women, ed. and intro. by
Paul Roazen, trans. Eric Mosbacher (London: Karnac Books, 1991; original edition, 1924), 100
101; idem, The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York:
Grune and Stratton, 1944-45), 2:290-91; Marie Langer, Motherhood and Sexuality, trans, and
intro by Nancy Caro Hollander (New York: The Guilford Press, 1992; original edition, 1951),
230, 233.
13Langer, Motherhood and Sexuality, 238.
"Deutsch, Psychoanalysis, 101; Langer, Motherhood, 233-34.
"Langer, Motherhood, 230-326; Deutsch, Psychology, 2:281; idem, Psychoanalysis, 101.
"Eli Sagan, Freud, Women, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil (New York:
Basic Books, 1988), 137-38.
l7See Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1976-84); and Judith
Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York and London:
Routledge, 1993).
"Alice S. Rossi, "Eros and Caritas: A Biopsychosocial Approach to Human Sexuality and
Reproduction," in Sexuality Across the Life Course, ed. Alice S. Rossi, Studies on Successful
Midlife Development, 3-36 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 4-6.
"Ibid., 25.
20Ibid„ 19-30.
21Ibid., 18-19.
22Newton, "Interrelationships," 77.
23Alice S. Rossi, "Matemalism, Sexuality, and the New Feminism," in Contemporary
Sexual Behavior: Critical Issues in the 1970s, ed. Joseph Zubin and John Money (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 145-73, especially 165-70.
24Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, 3rd ed. (San Francisco:
Harper and Row, 1986), 81-82, 97-99.
25Ibid., 92-3 (see 95 for an even more baroque paean to the breast); 206-7.
26Ibid., 263-5, 284-5.
27Ibid., 363.
28Ibid., 88-89.
29E.g., Sheila Kitzinger, Woman's Experience of Sex (New York: Penguin, 1983), 159, 225
230.
30Elaine Westerlund, Women's Sexuality after Childhood Incest (New York: W.W. Norton,
1992), 53-54; 59; 51,70.
31Newton noted that women who were enthusiastic toward breastfeeding seem to be more
comfortable with their own sexuality and with sexuality in general than those who were not; see
Newton, Maternal Emotions, and Newton, "Interrelationships," 83-84.
32Edward Brongersma, Loving Boys: A Multidisciplinary Study of Sexual Relations Between
Adult and Minor Males, 2 vols., intro. by Vern. L. Bullough (Elmhurst, NY: Global Academic
Publishers, 1986-1990).
"Brongersma, 2:47-50.
34Oxenhandler, "The Eros of Parenthood," 47.
35Ibid.
36Rich, Of Woman Bom, 36.
"Julia Kristeva, "Stabat Mater," trans León S. Roudiez, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril
Moi, 160-186 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 169.
38Winnicott, The Child, 7-8.
39Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 210.
""ibid. See also Rich, Of Woman Born, 36.
■"Kristeva, "Stabat Mater," 167-69.
42Rich, Of Woman Born, 31-33.
43Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 212-14.
44Oxenhandler, "The Eros of Parenthood," 49.
45On the latter see Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 206.
"Carter Heyward and Marie M. Fortune, "An Exchange: Boundaries or Barriers?"
Christian Century 111, no. 18 (June 1-8, 1994): 581. The point is Fortune's.
47See especially Marie M. Fortune, Is Nothing Sacred? When Sex Invades the Pastoral
Relationship (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989).
48Marie M. Fortune, "Therapy and Intimacy: Confused about Boundaries" [review of Carter
Heyward, When Boundaries Betray Us: Beyond Illusions of What is Ethical in Therapy and Life]
The Christian Century 111, no. 17 (May 18-25, 1994): 525.
49Marie M. Fortune, Love Does No Harm: Sexual Ethics for the Rest of Us, foreword by M.
Joycelyn Elders, preface by James B. Nelson (New York: Continuum, 1995), 77,79.
"Fortune, Love Does No Harm, 38-39.
5,Ibid„ 83.
52Analogues taken from Fortune, "Is Nothing Sacred?" 353-4. See also Fortune, "Therapy,"
525.
53 Heyward, "Exchange," 579-80.
54See Fortune, "Therapy" and "Exchange."
55Cf. Carter Heyward, Touching our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God
(San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1989), 34-35.
56See Christine E. Gudorf, "Parenting, Mutual Love, and Sacrifice," in Women's
Consciousness, Women's Conscience: A Reader in Feminist Ethics, ed. Barbara Hilkert
Andolsen, Christine E. Gudorf, and Mary D. Pellauer, 175-91 (San Francisco: Harper and Row,
1985), 185.
"Fortune, "Therapy," 525, italics added.
"Lisa Sowle Cahill, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics, New Studies In Christian Ethics,
no. 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 79.
59 Ibid., 102-7.
"Ibid., 89.
61 Ibid., 97.
62Ibid. 46-47; see also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II 91.2 and 94.
"Cahill, Sex, 49.
64See e.g. ibid., 236.
65See also Cristina L. H. Traina, Undoing Anathemas (working title), forthcoming; and
Pamela M. Hall, Narrative and the Natural Law: An Interpretation of Thomistic Ethics (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 37.
"On marital sexuality see Cahill, Sex, 60-61, 108-120; on the ethics of adult sexuality see
also Lisa Sowle Cahill, Between the Sexes (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1985).
"See, e.g., Cahill, Sex, 97; this is not to be a call to fulfill our "true nature."
"Christine E. Gudorf, Body, Sex, and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics
(Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1994), 97, 114.
69 Ibid., 63.
'"Gudorf, "Parenting," 182. Many of Gudorf s reflections have been inspired by her
adoptive children, for whom she did not care in their infancies; the language of "parenting," quite
important to the essay, also signifies this distinction.
"Ibid., 181-86.
72Ibid., 183. On the self-interested dimension of mutuality in general, see also Heyward,
Touching Our Strength.
"Gudorf, "Parenting," 184, 186-7.

"Ibid., 184, 185.
"On the latter, see ibid., 187-88,190.
"See Gudorf, Body, 98,115.
77Ibid., 90.
78On bodyright, see ibid., chapter 6, and Christine E. Gudorf, "Western Religion and the
Patriarchal Family," in Feminist Ethics and the Catholic Moral Tradition, Readings in Moral
Theology No. 9, ed. Charles E. Curran, Margaret A. Farley, and Richard A. McCormick, S.J.,
251-77 (New York: Paulist Press, 1996), 268-72.
"Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother: Work and Family as a Theological Dilemma
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), 94; for examples see 92, 129, 135-36.
80Ibid., 147-48.
''Bonnie Miller-McLemore, "Family and Work: Can Anyone 'Have It AH?"' in Religion,
Feminism, and the Family, ed. Anne Carr and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, 275-93 (Louisville:
Westminster/John Knox, 1996), 289.
82Ibid.
83See Bonnie Miller-McLemore, "What's a Feminist Mother to Do?" in Setting the Table:
Women in Theological Conversation, ed. Rita Nakashima Brock, et al., 185-204 (St. Louis:
Chalice Press, 1995), 192; and Miller-McLemore, "Family and Work."
84Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother, 136.
83Ibid., 148.

Passionate Mothering Towards An Ethic of Appropriate Mother-Child Intimacy

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Passionate Mothering Towards An Ethic of Appropriate Mother-Child Intimacy

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Society of Christian Ethics

Passionate Mothering: Toward an Ethic of Appropriate Mother-Child Intimacy

Women's informal accounts of their experience, news reports, and

Nothing, to be sure, had prepared me for the intensity of relationship

This is not a purely theoretical question. The confusion of perspectives is

of a young mother outside Syracuse whose two-year-old daughter was

chapter of the La Leche League support group. Anyone at La Leche

Secular Psychology and Ethics

Each of the schools of thought below contributes something essential to the

reminder to watch for ideological dragons, to avoid reducing women to mothers,

Freudian appreciation for the crucial and fragile process of psychological

and hospitalized and orphaned children.34 Relaxed breastfeeding—the perfect

Brongersma's arguments could lead us—as he unabashedly admits—toward

crystallizing symbol not of self-loss but of a kind of self-restructuring.

the experience and moral practice of mothering. Failure to reincorporate these

The purpose of clear boundaries is not to preserve some cache of

These limits are indispensable in a culture in which gross imbalance—for instance,

1. Is my choice of intimate partner a peer, that is, someone whose power

Student-teacher, congregant-minister, client-therapist, and employee-employer

To this point we have explored a phenomenon and have begun to articulate

Lisa Sowle Cahill and Natural Law

The feminist dilemma is that, while to ignore women's particular embodiment

Although, as I will show, Cahill's conclusions on adult sexuality provide an

Christine E. Gudorfand Self-interested Love

Christine Gudorf's powerful writing on sexuality and parenting develops most

When we assume that to do the hard, self-sacrificing thing is to do the

When we overemphasize the Gift-love in our loving and deemphasize

direction: It would be an unnatural and deluded mother who never admitted to

Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore and Demonic Distortion

The central claims of Bonnie Miller-McLemore's writing on maternity

The strategy of this essay has simply been to assemble a collage of

destroys knowledge, reason, and will. The constellation of insights that

"Gudorf, "Parenting," 184, 186-7.

You might also like